[mythtv-users] Dec 2008 - State of the Art - Hard Drive Recommendations?

[Sandy Walsh]

Martin Bene wrote:
> You may get more meaningful results with a better description of what you're actually looking for:
>  - frontend?
>  - backend?
>  - garage or living room?
>  - how big is "big enough" ?
>
> That being said, I'll just asume that
>  - you're looking for a harddisk for a Backend
>  - heat/sound are moderately important but noiseless is not a requirement
>  - "big enough" is impossible anyway :-)
>   
Good point Martin. While this is a generic discussion, personally I am 
looking for a backend system and I'll be recording as many streams as I 
can from a number of capture cards. I think this and your other 
assumptions are correct.

>> 3. Is it Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)? Is this a meaningful metric
>> anymore?
>>     
> The big/cheap sata drives are regarded as "desktop" products by the manufacturers; I'D say MTBF is pretty useless as a metric for these drives. Manufacturer Warrany of 3 or 5 years with simple handling of reiar/replacement is much more important for me.
>   

Do you put any stock in this metric for non-desktop drives (like 
DVR-specific drives)?

> * hardware raid controllers for > 4 disks are quite expensive
> * in case of a controller failure, you'll be quite limited in choice for a replacement that can read your old data.
> * softraid will work regardless of controller used to connect the drives to your mythbox
> * overhead/performance on a modern system isn't a big issue.
> * configuration/maintenance can be an issue.
>   
Interesting. Any idea what a typical CPU overhead might be for a typical 
soft raid option?

Thanks again Martin!

-S

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20081217/f95bbc38/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: swalsh.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 335 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20081217/f95bbc38/attachment.vcf